BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Borat says 'I like' to joining Les Miserables

From Borat to Les Mis: Sacha Baron Cohen is in final negotiations to appear in the movie version

Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen is in final negotiations to appear alongside Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe in the movie of the Les Miserables musical.

Baron Cohen will play the role of scheming innkeeper M. Thenardier who, with his baleful wife Madame Thenardier, causes much harm to the hero Jean Valjean and those closest to him.

However painful they are, the Thenardiers have the show’s funniest numbers such as Master Of The House and Dog Eats Dog. The decrepit couple ill-treat children in their care and serve patrons sausages made of horse innards, cat liver and pigswill. Worst of all, they water the wine.

There had been much chatter about Geoffrey Rush playing Thenardier — particularly as he had worked with Les Miserables’ director Tom Hooper before on last year’s Oscar-winning picture The King’s Speech. But Rush is busy on another project.

However, Helena Bonham Carter — who played Queen Elizabeth in The King’s Speech — is in discussions to play Madame Thenardier, although no deal has yet been done.

Hooper, along with Cameron Mackintosh (who is producing with Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan from Working Title Films), heard Baron Cohen sing and then offered him the part.

A lot of the negotiations are to do with scheduling because Baron Cohen is now working on Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, having just finished The Dictator.

He’s also signed on to play Freddie Mercury in a film biography.

However you slice it, Les Miserables is a huge deal and will be an epic musical of the kind they’re not supposed to make anymore.

Jackman and Crowe will play, respectively, Valjean and his nemesis Inspector Javert. Anne Hathaway will play Fantine, and Eddie Redmayne will be Marius.

Broadway actor Aaron Tveit has just been cast as Enjolras, the heroic student leader who heads the march to the Paris barricades.

There are a handful of principal parts still to be cast — and scores of smaller ones.

Filming is due to start on locations in London in March.

Love comes alive Down Under...

Andrew Lloyd Webber showed me a filmed version of the Melbourne production of his musical Love Never Dies.

For reasons I’ve already written about, the original London production didn’t work out here.

But the composer allowed director Simon Phillips (he directed Priscilla: Queen Of The Desert, the musical) to stage the show as he wanted in Australia.

Australian hit: Anna O'Byrne in Love Never Dies

Lloyd Webber then gave Phillips permission to take cameras into the theatre and shoot Love Never Dies.

The result is astounding. The film, sans interval, runs at two hours and is glossy, beautifully shot — and allows Lloyd Webber’s haunting score to live on. I’m driving my colleagues nuts humming it.

I remain a huge fan of Sierra Boggess, who played Christine Daae in London. But Anna O’Byrne in the Aussie show (pictured) is good, too.

Lloyd Webber said that the LND film opens up a new future for musicals. ‘You can make a permanent record of shows. What it means is that for relatively little money you get a film that maybe you screen in a cinema for a couple of nights and then release as a DVD,’ he told me.

Love never dies Down Under: Andrew Lloyd Webber, pictured with wife Madeline, has given permission for cameras to film his Australian stage version of Lover Never Dies

He’s now exploring whether to work with Glenn Close on a film of another of his musicals, Sunset Boulevard. ‘We’d rehearse and use a sound stage or a theatre and film it as a performance on stage,’ he explained.

Big budget: Glenn Close could be asked to be in the next filmed stage show, Sunset Boulevard, with a budget of £1.5million

Love Never Dies cost £400,000 to shoot.
Because Sunset Boulevard would have to be set up from scratch, a film of
that would run to around £1.5 million.

The good lord wondered about How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, in which Daniel Radcliffe gives his final performance in on January 1.

The actor has been with it for ten months and he’s absolutely effortless in the role. ‘You can’t tell me that 100,000 — or more — wouldn’t pay to see Harry Potter sing and dance?’

It’s too late for Daniel to shoot now . . . although who knows?

Maybe the show’s director Rob Ashford can persuade him to come back onto the How To Succeed set for a couple of performances, and film them.

The LND movie, meanwhile, might give theatre owners in Toronto and New York a sense of that show’s potential. And perhaps it might entice a director to take it on and interpret it differently from the London and Melbourne iterations.

However, Lloyd Webber said he thought it would be several years before LND would be ready to return to the West End.

In the meantime, there’s always the DVD.

Silent film gets us all talking

Pucker up: Berenice Bejo is the leading lady of Oscar contender The Artist which was shot by her husband Michel Hazanavicius

Berenice Bejo is the leading lady of Oscar contender The Artist, set in silent-era Hollywood. It was shot by Ms Bejo’s husband, Michel Hazanavicius, in LA.

Ms Bejo plays Peppy, a hoofer who works her way up from the chorus line to top billed star.

But as she moves up the ladder, George Valentin, a silent giant — an artist, really — played by Jean Dujardin, sees his star decline as the talkies turn up the volume.

Berenice watched movies by actresses who went to Hollywood and then moved seamlessly into talking pictures. Women like Janet Gaynor. She watched their faces.

‘I wore a lot of lipstick because of how people moved their lips. So I trusted my husband to make sure my mouth — and my eyes — are very adorable.’

I saw the film again at a public screening at the Paris cinema just off of 5th Avenue and there was applause.

Harvey Weinstein is hosting a private screening at London’s Charlotte Street Hotel on Sunday, with special guest Dolores Chaplin — granddaughter of the little tramp himself, Charlie Chaplin. Fingers on lips and just watch. And switch those mobiles OFF!

Watch out for...

Sam Mendes, who is hoping to bring a musical version of Roald Dahl’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory into the West End in 2013. I can reveal that the Warner Bros studio, which controls the book’s rights, is in early negotiations for the show to open at the London Palladium.

Charlie And The Chocolate Factory: Sam Mendes has a sweet tooth

Mendes and his team will rehearse early in 2013 and then begin previews in May of that year.

Designer Mark Thompson has already begun preliminary work on how The Chocolate Factory will look, and Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman are writing the show using a libretto by David Greig. Peter Darling will choreograph Charlie.

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar. The pair are reaping a pretty nice return on the show they created four decades ago.

A stadium version will run at the O2 for a few days next September and then go on an arena tour of the UK.

A breathtaking new production by Des MacAnuff wowed audiences this summer at the Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, and is running at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, before transferring to New York in March.

Lloyd Webber said he didn’t think the show’s arena tour would harm plans for MacAnuff to direct his production in London sometime late next year or early 2013.